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Printing ASCII-art images with a hardcopy terminal Overstrike Emoji Kanji
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Based on SOC occupation classification
| name | overstrike-images |
| description | Printing ASCII-art images with a hardcopy terminal Overstrike Emoji Kanji |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | hugh |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["ascii","teletype","asr33","tty","overstrike","hardcopy","art","kanji","emoji"],"category":"tty"}} |
Check out the repo https://github.com/hughpyle/ASR33 to ~/play/asr33
Check out the repo https://github.com/hughpyle/art1.js to ~/play/art1.js
Check that ~/play/asr33/bin is in your PATH
The images directory contains various images using overstrike printing. In the Teletype hardcopy terminal, a line ending with CR
does not advance the paper, it only returns the carriage to the left. Print one or more lines with CR separation. Print with CR+LF separattion to advance to the next line.
Ready-to-print images (text files with CR and CR/LF) are in the images direectory of this skill.
Pitfall: do not reconstruct overstrike art from line-numbered or rendered text; CR-only separators can be corrupted or omitted. Print from raw prepared bytes, preserving CR characters exactly. If chat delivery drops overstrikes after a few lines, retry in smaller chunks or use the dashboard binary path.
For Hugh's /Users/hugh/play/tty-skills dashboard teletype plugin, the robust byte-accurate path is base64 binary blocks: wrap raw prepared bytes in <BINARY>...</BINARY> or <<BINARY>>...<</BINARY>>. The dashboard/backend plugin must parse the markers, base64-decode, validate allowed teletype bytes, and enqueue decoded bytes raw. Decoded binary segments must bypass wrapping, Unicode sanitizing, and LF-to-CRLF normalization so CR-only overstrikes survive. The plain terminal/chat stream does not interpret these wrappers by itself.
After changing dashboard plugin Python, for example plugins/teletype/dashboard/plugin_api.py, restart the dashboard process. /api/dashboard/plugins/rescan can refresh plugin discovery/assets but does not prove Python route code reload.
In the late 1960s, Katherine Nash, a sculptor at the University of Minnesota, and Richard H. Williams, a computer scientist, created ART 1 — a generative program designed to be used by artists, not programmers. Published in the journal Leonardo in 1970, ART 1 allowed an artist to define a small vocabulary of characters and a set of rules for their arrangement, then let the computer compose an image on the lineprinter.
Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) was a painter associated with hard-edge abstraction and geometric painting in postwar Los Angeles. In the late 1960s, he began working with computers at the University of New Mexico, using programs like ART 1 to generate compositions on a lineprinter.
You can print several recreations of ART1 works by Nash and Hammersley. Use art1 -list to list them.
Do NOT print "embroid", "lovely_meeting", "quads" or "ripples": these are ANSI terminal art.
ASCII overstrike works are: "spheroids", "good_line", "jelly_centers", and "tiddly_winks".
These are also available as text files in the images directory,
| File | Description |
|---|---|
spheroids.txt | Spheroids (Nash) |
good_line.txt | A Good Line is Hard To Beat (Hammersley) |
jelly_centers.txt | Jelly Centers (Hammersley) |
tiddly_winks.txt | Tiddly Winks (Hammersley) |
These are very large prints and take a long time.
Yes, emoji, printed with ASCII-63 hardcopy text. These are nice and small and pretty. Many emoji work well.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
duck.txt | An emoji duck |
fish.txt | An emoji fish |
shark.txt | An emoji shark |
shell.txt | An emoji shell |
wave.txt | An emoji wave |
You can generate any emoji using the hemoji tool.
Example: hemoji wave.
(This is one of my favorites).
These are special and quite large (they take a long time to print).
| File | Description |
|---|---|
han_board.txt | Kanji the classical Zen "Han no Ge" (板の偈) |
pjw.txt | A picture of Peter J Weinberger from Bell Labs. |
These are generated using the Python scripts in the asr33 repo:
# kanji (see asciiart/kanji/README.md, asciiart/code/overstrike_compose.py)
python overstrike_compose.py --from-font 生死事大 --rows 8 --font mincho_w3
The bin/pjw script generates the Peter J Weinberger picture, from the original at http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.jpg. The Python script asciiart/code/image2.py can process any PNG image.
Large images take a long time to prepare.
Prepared pictures in the asr33 repo include:
| File | Description |
|---|---|
buzz.jpg.txt | Buzz Aldrin |
dali.jpg.txt | Salvador Dalí |
mario.png.txt | Super Mario |
yoda2.png.txt | Yoda |
See asciiart/README.md for more details.
